Thursday, December 22, 2011

Getting Past 30 Years of Marketing- Bruce Carlin

You know you've been working for a long time when you reach for a calculator to figure out how many years you have been involved in marketing. This happenned to me recently as I started to upload old ads to our YouTube Channel, www.youtubecom/mediacentralllc. Actually the oldest videos I uploaded date back to 1981 in college, that year I finished my degree at Plattsburgh State and began working at WPTZ-TV as a production assistant.

I worked on the nightly newscast running teleprompter, and between the newscasts got the chance to edit station promos and commercials. An early news promo featured footage taken from NBC Nightly News and aircheck footage from Nightly News on 5.

One of my first commercials was for Bailey Ford in Malone, NY and I was given a Ford brochure and an aerial photograph and challeneged to make an ad.

I contrast this early commercial with one of my most recent, also for a car dealership, Knight Auto.

While the technology of creating tv ads has changed radically, the art of copywriting will never change, it's all about coming up with the best idea and combining that with the best use of whatever your raw materials are. The end result is to make an advertisement that motivates a potential buyer to consider the product when they go to make that purchase.